*For entertainment purposes only ;)

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A problem in pictures.

Twitter is like crack to alleged journalists. There was a surprisingly good article a while back (that I failed to find, unfortunately) about how many journalists spend the entire evenings on Twitter because of the instant faux reaction/validation that they receive from a successful Tweet. This creates an incestuous cycle involving journalists and insiders all sucking one another off on Twitter. Only about 10-15% of the population is even on Twitter so the impact is largely illusionary. It is not however completely insignificant. Opinions are occasionally formed and/or changed by a clever meme or genuine data presented in concise fashion. This entire phenomenon is why the following screen grabs are so disturbing and sadly, predictable.

Tweet #1 (Please note the time posted and number of likes and more importantly, retweets)

And now Tweet #2, posted only 41 minutes later:

5.6 thousand retweets of misleading news. The correction garnered 237. Depending on who retweeted the first tweet, the contrast in exposure for these two tweets could easily be in the hundreds of thousands. All of them getting fake news.